Early-College High School: Modest Experiment or National Movement?

By Nancy Hoffman and Michael Webb

In 2002, the first early-college high schools opened their doors amid fanfare from funders and the eight organizations initially chosen to develop the initiative.

Matching the fanfare was a very healthy skepticism from educators and policymakers, because the primary funder, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, had set a seemingly impossible goal for success: Students entering these new small high schools—young people chosen precisely because they were academically underprepared and often several years behind grade level—would graduate from high school four years later with two years of college credit or an...